One backstage room now houses “shoutcasters,” who provide play by play on the event.

And another has “observers.” These people watch every movement made by the occupants of those 12 chairs.

Stage One is now host to live broadcast video game tournaments, better known as “eSports.”

For those paying attention, new media has replaced old media almost overnight. And there’s lots of money to be made in this changing of the guard.

Kids Are Already Training for the Next NFL

The entire setup at Burbank Studios is for professional digital athletes.

These athletes are mostly young adults between 17 and 26 who compete live in front of an audience of millions.

They’re participants in the Overwatch League – a video gaming league with two divisions in 12 cities across the globe.

The game they are playing, Overwatch, is only a little over two years old. But it already has 40 million players.

More importantly, the game is raking in more than a billion dollars a year!

Owners of teams in the league include big players in sports, like Robert Kraft, (owner of the New England Patriots) and Francesco Aquilini (owner of the NHL’s Vancouver Canucks).

Nate Nanzer, vice president of Activision Blizzard and commissioner of the Overwatch League, said…

“There’s going to be kids who can say ‘I play professional Overwatch for the same guy that Tom Brady plays for.’”

Steve Bornstein was once president and CEO of ESPN, responsible for much of its success in the early ‘90s. Later he became the president of ABC Sports, and a short while later, the president of ABC. Then he moved on to become the president and CEO of the NFL Network.

A reporter asked why he decided to shift his career from traditional sports to eSports.

Bornstein borrowed a quote from all-time hockey great Wayne Gretzky, who said:

“Skate to where the puck is going.”

“When I left the NFL, the only thing I saw that had the potential to be as big was the eSports space,” he told Wired Magazine. “What fascinated me was just the level of engagement, the fact that we measure consumption in billions of minutes consumed.”

When Bornstein joined ESPN in the early ‘80s, it was only four months old.

Critics of the new network slammed the channel. Who would watch a channel devoted entirely to sports?

Fast forward and that thinking sounds absolutely crazy today.

So if you’re asking yourself right now, who would fill a stadium or watch a channel devoted entirely to video games? You will look back and see how crazy that sounds.

For Blizzard’s live broadcast of the Overwatch League, the answer to who would watch is easy: LOTS of people.

And huge emphasis on the LOTS.

The league reached nearly 11 million unique viewers across all platforms during its Grand Finals earlier this summer. And it reached an average of 280,000 viewers per minute on the popular streaming platforms Twitch and MLG (Major League Gaming) during its opening week.

If you don’t recognize the names Twitch and MLG…

You will. Very, very soon.

A Whole New Concept of Sports Is Kicking Off

Just last week, Nike signed its very first endorsement deal with an eSports athlete.

Jian “Uzi” Zihao will be featured alongside NBA Superstar LeBron James in the latter’s newest marketing campaign, “Dribble & _____”.

“Uzi” plays for the Chinese League of Legends team Royal Never Give Up (RNG).

RNG also has endorsement deals with some companies you may have heard of before, such as Mercedes-Benz and KFC.

This may be the first time you’ve seen eSports athletes advertised alongside big-name traditional sports athletes.